Asians and Exit Polls

I posted these charts yesterday and didn’t say anything about the trends in Asian voting patterns, prompting some consternation from various people in the comments section:

The reason I didn’t say anything is that the sample size of the Asian pool is very small, so I’m not sure you want to draw any real conclusions about the sub-samples of the small Asian sample that occur once you start slicing Asians into economic sub-categories. Still, the overall drop in support for Bush among Asians seems real enough. I think that it’s a sign, along with John McCain’s dismal poll numbers among Hispanics, that conservative politics has come to rely on a brand of nationalism that, though nominally color blind, in practice only appeals to white people.

And to be clear, you can see from these charts that it appeals strongly to white people, with Bush getting solid majorities among middle class whites and putting in a very respectable showing among poor whites. And there are a lot of white people in America. But the number of non-Hispanic whites shrinks slowly every year, making political appeals that only really resonate with non-hispanic whites increasingly hard to pull off.